Everyone loves a good dictator, at least at a distance. Dictators exert the same horror and fascination that snakes have for some people; Latin American literature, for example, would be very much the poorer without them. It seems that we cannot ever know too much about their daily lives, for their arbitrary power over life and death seems to give a wider significance to the most trivial detail of their existence.
Peter York, whom the blurb describes as ‘Britain’s original style guru’, has had the clever idea of making a picture book of dictators’ homes, 16 of them in all. The premise of the book is that by their décor shall ye know them. The pictures largely speak for themselves, but are accompanied by the style guru’s commentary, written in an arch, mid-Atlantic, facetious joke-a-minute style that often passes for wit, and that implies that the author has achieved final truth where aesthetic judgment is concerned. More than once, for example, he says that English furniture of the 18th century is the favourite of geriatric snobs the world over; but this, in my opinion, is a point very much in favour of geriatric snobbery. Of course, the very concept of a ‘style guru’ is the acme of vulgarity.
There are errors in the small amount of historical information provided. Milosevic did not try to annex Kosovo, because it always was, as it remains, a part of Serbia; he tried to prevent its separation from Serbia. And the preface to the book, by Douglas Coupland, is written in prose at least as vulgar as the decoration of any of the dictators’ houses which it presumes to mock.
The author displays no sign of having actually visited any of the houses he writes about; he works entirely from photographs, and the photographs of some of these establishments are so meagre as to convey no information or not to merit commentary. Thus the book, already short, should have been shorter. On the other hand, some of the photographs tell you almost everything you need to know — about Marcos and Saddam Hussein, for example — and provide a stimulus for endless meditation.
Saddam certainly takes the biscuit (by a pretty long way) for appalling bad taste. Marcos and Mobutu had more in common, aesthetically, with Harold Acton than with Saddam. The garish sado-masochistic frescoes with which Saddam had his palaces adorned are merely enlarged pictures from the strip cartoon genre known as ‘fantasy,’ which is sold in grubby shops to those grubby sado-masochists who, unlike Saddam, are without the courage of their inclinations. This style of ‘art’, incidentally, is that of most criminals in prison when they take up the pencil and brush.
Is there a feature unique to dictators’ houses, compared with those of, say, captains of industry who have started from nothing and made immense fortunes? Would you be able to walk into a dictator’s house without knowing to whom it belonged and say, ‘This is a dictator’s house’?
While the answer, strictly speaking, is in the negative, you would nevertheless be able clearly to discern the megalomania of the owner. The imagination freed from normal economic constraints, undisciplined by any aesthetic education and thirsting for revenge for past slights and humiliations, brings forth monsters as surely as the sleep of reason. Grandiosity, never a very appealing quality in a man, is disastrous in architecture and applied arts when divorced completely from any semblance of taste.
Although this book is a missed opportunity and does not provide any serious reflection on the aesthetics of arbitrary power, or raise the interesting question of why absolute monarchs should have had so much better taste than modern dictators, it is nonetheless irresistible.